[MLA] ***SPAM*** Re: More good news (Spotify)

[Thomas Lund]

Hi Bob,

While you were first to suggest the method, what might make it viable is a combination of subsequent improvements such as different target level for album vs single and the attenuate only principle, plus - importantly - Eelco's systematic investigation.

cheers,
Thomas



> On 23/05/2017, at 22.51, Bob Katz <bobkatz24bit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hey guys, I came up with that first: album normalization for everything. I've argued for that from day one.
> 
> 
> Bob K.
> 
> On 5/23/17 3:02 PM, Robert Ludwig wrote:
>> Hi Eelco and Ian,
>> 
>> This is all amazing.  Using Album normalization for everything is something that just never occurred to me, thanks for out-of-the-box thinking, Eelco!
>> 
>> Yes, I've know Buddy Judge pretty well for over 5 years now, we worked together during the “pre-release” stage of MFiT.  I met him in person in California and he has always been very straight forward with me.  I’m so glad to finally read SOME rationale for why Apple has not turned on Sound Check. 
>> 
>> I had two questions:
>> 
>> 1.  I agree that all services should use the same algorithm for normalization.
>> 
>> Eelco, I’m not clear about this:
>> VERY often we do a single that is being released before the album is finished.  
>> How will the average album level be determined if there is no album with which to measure when the single is released?
>> 
>> 2. Does Sound Check measure highly compressed music any better than BS1770 (I assume -4)?  I’d be surprised if it did.
>> 
>> That is mind-blowing that someone would put 20kHz tones into the music in order to make it louder.  
>> 
>> I’m very encouraged by all of this!
>> 
>> All my best,
>> Bob L.
>> 
>> 
>>> Yesterday Buddy Judge, senior product manager at Apple and responsible for iTunes, came to me after my presentation. We had a beer and then we even went for dinner together ("all on Tim" :-). Buddy is a cool guy and a musician (I guess Bob Ludwig knows him well since he is also the guy behind "Mastered for iTunes"). Buddy told me a few interesting things that may help us understand why normalization was not turned on by default yet:
>>> 1. The artistic integrity is very important for Apple. Just like Tidal they do not like that with track normalization the loudness integrity of an album is disturbed. Buddy told me it had never come to his mind to advocate using album normalization even in shuffle mode, but he found it an interesting concept that he would love to test.
>>> 2. Buddy said that if normalization would be turned on by default, all streaming services should use the same type of normalization so mastering engineers can anticipate to it and would not have to make seperate masters for every different platform (because many will likely still aim for being the loudest). ITU BS1770 seemed to make most sense to him, although he knew that compressed music is measured a little too loud by BS1770. Album normalization with the loudest track aligned to target level also made most sense (in my presentation I showed that when normalizing the _average_ album level (like currently in iTunes), the loudness of the loud hit tracks would only be known when the full album is finished - this is a clear no-go for a mastering engineer).
>>> 
>>> We promised to stay in regular contact the next few months and all in all this feels _very_ encouraging. 
>>> 
>>> But this brings me to an important note. Pop music mastering engineers might even be worse than Italian commercial mix engineers. So if the latter ingest 20 kHz tones just above the relative gate threshold, to gain 1 or 2 dB of level, this will probably happen to pop masters too. Florian, it will become even more important to convince ITU to add the HF low pass filter to K weighting, so we better make sure that this development is not delayed too much...
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Eelco
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> 
> If you want good sound on your album, come to
> Bob Katz 407-831-0233 DIGITAL DOMAIN MASTERING STUDIO
> Author: Mastering Audio              
> Digital Domain Website <http://www.digido.com/>
> 
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